PIB Rises To The Occasion To Embarrass Modi Government On Its Third Anniversary

Oops, PIB did it again.

NEW DELHI -- On it's third anniversary in power, while the Narendra Modi-led government was (predictably) celebrating its achievements with several new announcements and project launches, the government's Press Information Bureau (PIB) was right on schedule with a new blooper.

This time, the government media wing published a 10-page report on Friday that outlined its successes and failures in different public sectors. The report, uploaded on the PIB website, which detailed the Modi governments successes and failures--in itself a curious move--was, as it later turned out, not even a government document.

The report--titled "Three years of Modi government: A report card"--was actually a copy of an article published in the Mint newspaper earlier in the day in both its print and digital edition. Quickly realising their mistake, PIB took the report down from its website by Friday afternoon.

@KanchanGupta And if I may make it "curioser", the report card carried by FE is actually Mint's assessment of this government published in this AM's paper

But not before Financial Express had already published a story on the report, lauding the government for taking "self-criticism to a new level". As the FE story did the rounds on social media, readers congratulated the Modi administration for its self-reflection. The article has been pulled down since then, after PIB admitted to having uploaded the report by mistake.

The original story, written by Meenal Thakur of Mint, was published on Friday as a critical look at the Modi government's highlights and lowlights since May 2014.

This is not the first time that the PIB has caused huge embarrassment to the Modi government. In 2015, it released a photoshopped image of Narendra Modi surveying the Chennai floods, and was mocked with memes and criticised for not even writing a proper clarification.

Correction: An earlier version of the copy incorrectly attributed the Mint article to Meenal Baghel instead of Meenal Thakur. This has been corrected, and the error is regretted.